This Is How You Lose the Time War

So I go. I travel farther and faster and harder than most, and I read, and I write, and I love cities. To be alone in a crowd, apart and belonging, to have distance between what I see and what I am.

I love you. I love you. I love you. I’ll write it in waves. In skies. In my heart. You’ll never see, but you will know. I’ll be all the poets, I’ll kill them all and take each one’s place in turn, and every time love’s written in all the strands it will be to you.

But maybe this is how we win, Red. You and me. This is how we win.

Words can wound—but they’re bridges, too. (Like the bridges that are all that Genghis left behind.) Though maybe a bridge can also be a wound? To paraphrase a prophet: Letters are structures, not events. Yours give me a place to live inside.

Thus we braid Strand 6 to Strand 9, and our glorious crystal future shines so bright I gotta wear shades, as the prophets say.

Eating’s gross, isn’t it? In the abstract, I mean. When you’re used to hyperspace recharging stations, to sunlight and cosmic rays, when most of the beauty you’ve known lies in a great machine’s heart, it’s hard to see the appeal of using bones that poke from spit-coated gums to mash things that grew in dirt into a paste that will fit down the wet

One spared life might be worth more to the other side than all the blood that stained Red’s hands today. A fugitive becomes a queen or a scientist or, worse, a poet.

Some days Blue wonders why anyone ever bothered making numbers so small; other days she supposes even infinity needs to start somewhere.

Books are letters in bottles, cast into the waves of time, from one person trying to save the world to another. Keep reading. Keep writing. Keep fighting. We’re all still here.